Arc System Works has built the most inventive tag fighter in years, and on PS5 it plays exactly the way a fighting game has to play. The PC version is the asterisk on an otherwise superb launch.
The nine years I spent pretending I was over it
I gave up on Marvel fighting games in 2017. Not dramatically, not with a post about it, just quietly, the way you stop checking a band’s tour dates. Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite had landed with a thud, Capcom and Marvel went their separate ways, and the whole thing settled into nostalgia. I kept a copy of Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 installed for years and touched it maybe twice a year, mostly to remind myself what that speed felt like.
So when Sony ended a State of Play in June 2025 by handing the license to Arc System Works, my first reaction was suspicion rather than excitement. Arc System Works makes beautiful things. Arc System Works also makes things that ask a lot of you, and Marvel fighting games have historically asked very little at the door and everything after it. 14 months later I have finished all five Episode arcs, run the Champion Course in All-Star Arena, taken far too many ranked losses with a Ghost Rider team I refuse to abandon, and I can say the suspicion was misplaced. This is the best Marvel fighting game since 2011, and it gets there by not trying to be one.
The Challenge of the Champion
MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls frames itself with old-school comics rather than the MCU. The Champion of the Universe, an Elder who has been destroying planets that fail to produce a worthy opponent, has picked Earth as his next stop. His Promoter announces the Challenge of the Champion, and the planet’s heroes and villains are forced into teams of four to fight through qualifiers before anyone gets a shot at the man himself. Marvel gave the game its own designation, Earth-358, and that decision matters more than it sounds. Nothing here has to hold hands with Avengers: Doomsday or with Insomniac’s Wolverine. The story is closed, self-contained, and free to put Doctor Doom and Magneto on the same squad without explaining itself for 20 minutes first.
There are 20 fighters at launch, split into five teams of four. The Fighting Avengers are Captain America, Iron Man, Hulk and Shuri’s Black Panther. The Amazing Guardians put Spider-Man alongside Ms. Marvel, Star-Lord and Peni Parker in SP//dr. The Unbreakable X-Men are Storm, Wolverine, Magik and Danger. The Knights of Doom gather Doctor Doom, Magneto, Norman Osborn’s Green Goblin and Cletus Kasady’s Carnage. The Samurai Outriders are Robbie Reyes’ Ghost Rider, Blade, Loki and Deadpool. Those team names govern Episode Mode only; everywhere else you build whatever four you want, and the game invents a name for the combination on the spot and has a ring announcer bellow it at you.
Danger and Peni Parker are the picks that tell you who was in charge of this roster. A sentient Danger Room and a teenage mech pilot from another universe are not the choices of a licensing committee. They are the choices of a studio that wanted archetypes it could build interesting fighters around, and both of them are among the most distinctive characters in the game.
Assemble: how a 1v1 becomes a 4v4
Here is the idea the whole game hangs on, and it is genuinely new. You do not start a round with four characters. You start with your point character and a single assist, and the rest of your team arrives as the fight escalates. Deal enough damage, land a Wall Break, and another member becomes available, until both sides are running the full lineup and the screen is doing things that would have crashed a PlayStation 3.
The Wall Break comes straight from Guilty Gear Strive, triggered by a heavy combo in the corner, and it does double duty here. It hurls the fight into a different area of the stage, which is spectacle, and it opens up your team, which is strategy. Stages are built as multiple connected arenas rather than one backdrop, so a round in Marvel’s New York or the Savage Land physically moves as it goes.
Teams share a single Vital Gauge that lengthens as more of your squad becomes available. That one choice fixes the oldest problem in tag fighters. There is no anchor character you keep in reserve because they have a health bar of their own, no touch-of-death combo that erases a third of your team in one sequence, no sense that the match was decided by which character got opened up first. Damage is damage. What you lose when you take a bad hit is tempo.
Assists run off a separate Assemble Gauge, and you pick each character’s assist direction on the select screen. Forward assists throw out projectiles to break up an approach; downward assists cover you against anything coming from above. The clever part is the Crossover, which lets you tag the assist character in and take control of them either just before or just after their attack lands. That is where the game stops being a fighter with helpers attached and becomes something you have to think about in four dimensions. Meanwhile the Skill Gauge handles EX moves and Ultimate Skills, and you can spend Assemble meter to chain Ultimates across the whole team, which is this game’s Delayed Hyper Combo and looks every bit as absurd as it should.
Defense gets its own version of the same idea. Crossover works out of blockstun as well, pulling an ally in to counterattack while you are guarding, and the attacker can answer that with a Crossover Reflect. Time the reflect exactly and it upgrades to a Perfect Reflect, which knocks the crossing player down and leaves them Disassembled, locked out of assists and team mechanics for a short window. That is the pressure release valve this format needs. Without it, four characters of unbroken offense would be unbearable.
One character to start, four to master
Sekine has said the goal was that you only need to master one character to play, and that is not marketing. You can main Wolverine, set three assists you barely understand, and get real value out of the game for weeks. Every character shares a Light, Medium and Heavy normal plus a Unique Attack tied to their identity, so Captain America throws the shield, Iron Man fires repulsors, and the muscle memory transfers when you finally try someone else.
Inputs come in traditional and simplified flavors, and the simplified set is not a toy. Character Lessons run a long ladder of combo challenges, the training mode is as thorough as anything Arc System Works has shipped, and there are Character Guides built into the game rather than parked on YouTube.
Where it gets hard is not execution. It is knowing what to do. The 4v4 escalation means the right decision five seconds in is not the right decision 40 seconds in, because the tools available to both players have changed in between. That is a genuinely demanding thing to hold in your head, and it is the one place where I think the accessibility push runs out of road. Getting comfortable is easy. Getting good is not, and no amount of simplified input is going to change that.
The characters themselves justify the study. Magik teleports through Dark Portals and swings the Soulsword at ranges that make no sense until you have eaten it four times. Peni Parker plays a trap-and-drone game inside SP//dr, and slips into Japanese in her voice lines across every language version. Ghost Rider builds a Vengeance Gauge. Ms. Marvel’s Elasti-Grab covers ground and then leaves you guessing between a grab and an overhead. Danger fills the screen with mines and lasers and is, in the nicest possible way, deeply annoying to fight.
Episode Mode is a comic you watch
The single-player story is called Episode Mode, it runs about 10 hours across the five team arcs, and Kieron Gillen wrote all of it from scratch. That is the same Gillen behind Journey into Mystery, Young Avengers and Immortal X-Men, and having an actual comics writer working to the game rather than a licensed adaptation of an existing run is why this is the most literate story mode a fighting game has had in a long time. A different artist handles each arc, so the five stories look and feel distinct.
The presentation is motion comic. Hand-drawn panels with movement added, voice acting in 10 languages, DualSense haptics tied to the beats, battles punctuating the chapters rather than driving them. If you came expecting World Tour or Arcade Quest, this is not that, and I understand the disappointment. It is closer to reading with the pages animated, and the flow leans heavily on your willingness to sit and take it in.
I think it works, largely because the writing earns it. There is a glossary and a character relationship chart in there for anyone who does not know why Storm ending up in charge is a big deal, and neither feels like homework. Gillen writes Loki the way Loki should be written. Doom is given actual gravity. And the Japanese track carries a posthumous performance from Takaya Hashi as Doctor Doom, recorded before his death in August 2025, which lands harder than a fighting game story mode has any right to.
How it looks, and how it runs on PS5
Arc System Works built this in Unreal Engine 5 rather than the in-house tech behind Strive, and you would not guess. The house style survives intact: 2.5D models lit and posed to read as hand-drawn cels, animation that snaps to the beat of the frame data, and a Marvel art direction rooted in anime rather than in the comics or the films. Iron Man’s armor borrows from mecha anime. Captain America’s voice direction is pure shōnen protagonist. Marvel pushed the studio toward this rather than away from it, which was the right call, because the alternative was a slightly stiffer Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite.
On PS5 it is locked at 60fps in battle, on both the base console and the Pro, and it does not budge. The Pro adds PSSR upscaling, which buys you a cleaner image at 4K with no cost to the frame rate; on a base PS5 the presentation is slightly softer and identical in feel. Load times are effectively gone, which matters more in a fighting game than in almost any other genre, because rematching is the whole loop.
The one number worth knowing is input lag. The launch build sits about 10ms faster than the open beta, which is a real improvement and one Arc System Works clearly went looking for. It still trails the PC version by roughly one to two frames. If you play on a stick and you came from Street Fighter 6, you will feel that in the first half hour and then stop noticing it. If you are training for a regional, it is a genuine consideration and it should not be brushed off just because everything else on the console side is in excellent shape.
Fight sticks and leverless controllers connect over USB and work without ceremony, and the DualSense haptics are used well enough that I kept the pad in rotation for casual sets.
Stronger as One
Sanzigen animated the opening under Daisuke Suzuki, in the exact register of an early-2000s anime intro, and it is the best thing of its kind since the Street Fighter Alpha days. The theme is “Stronger as One”, with Keiko Terada of SHOW-YA and mayu of NEMOPHILA trading vocals over an arrangement by MEG of MEGMETAL, lyrics by Kanata Okajima. It went out as a single two weeks before launch and I have not skipped the intro once since.
The in-game music is Arc System Works doing what Arc System Works does, which is rock that pushes the tempo rather than sitting behind it. Sound design carries the heavier load, though. Three-dimensional audio on PS5 gives every assist call a position, and in a format where four characters can be on screen you learn to hear an incoming assist before you see it. That is not decoration. That is defense.
Online, crossplay and the PC problem
The netcode is rollback and it holds up. Ranked and casual matchmaking both filled quickly through launch week, the 64-player open lobby is stuffed with Easter eggs and minigames under the Battle Arcadia banner, and private rooms behave. On PS5, online play has been close to trouble-free.
Now the part I am not going to skirt, because it is what everyone is arguing about. The PC version is in poor shape. Steam user reviews sit at Mixed, with 43 percent of the English-language reviews positive, and the complaints are almost entirely technical rather than about the game itself. Stuttering and frame drops on hardware well past the published minimum of an RTX 2060 and a Core i5-8400, on rigs that run Tekken 8 at a locked 60. Easy Anti-Cheat, which runs at kernel level and has to be uninstalled by hand afterward, blocking the game outright on Linux and SteamOS, which shuts out Steam Deck and Steam Machine owners with no warning before release. A PlayStation account required for anything online. A day-one patch reduced CPU usage and improved shader warm-up and anti-aliasing, and Arc System Works has publicly acknowledged that it is investigating, but as of this writing it is not fixed.
This bleeds onto the console version in exactly one way, and it is worth knowing about. Crossplay is on by default, and rollback works best when both machines are holding frame rate. Enough PS5 players have turned crossplay off during launch week that it has become common advice, and after a handful of stuttery cross-platform sets I understand why. That is a fixable problem and I expect it fixed. It is also the single biggest reason the launch feels messier than the game deserves.
All-Star Arena, Arcadia Rumble and the year ahead
Offline content is generous by fighting game standards, and it is worth listing what is actually here rather than waving at it. All-Star Arena is a course-based single-player run with a roguelike shape, escalating through team battles toward the Champion Course, and it is where I spent most of my time once the ranked losses started stinging. Arcadia Rumble is the party mode, up to eight players controlling their chibi lobby avatars in a beat-em-up scramble for stars and Fighter Souls that buff your stats mid-match, playable offline against CPUs. It is the mode you hand a controller to someone who has never blocked an overhead in their life, and it does that job better than any tacked-on party mode has a right to.
Add local versus, training, Character Lessons and Episode Mode, and the base package is well stocked. The trophy list runs to 39 on PS5 including the platinum, and the requirements point squarely at the offline content rather than at grinding ranked.
Post-launch is a Year 1 Character and Stage Pass with four fighters and a stage. First up is Phoenix Cyclops from Avengers vs. X-Men, voiced by Ray Chase of X-Men ’97, arriving in the fall, and a free Marvel’s Wolverine crossover costume lands for all players on September 1. Four characters over a year is a modest roadmap for a tag fighter where team composition is the entire game, and it is fair to want more. It is also fair to note that 20 launch characters with no duplicated archetypes is more than this genre usually gives you.
Verdict
MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls is the rarest thing a licensed fighting game can be, which is a design idea rather than a cast list. The escalating 4v4, the shared Vital Gauge and the Crossover tag add up to a format nobody else has, and Arc System Works has built it with the polish of a studio that has been rehearsing for this for a decade. It looks superb, it reads clearly in motion despite the chaos, it has a story mode written by someone who understands these characters, and it runs at a rock-solid 60fps on PS5.
The reservations are real and none of them are fatal. Input lag on console still trails PC by a frame or two. Episode Mode asks you to watch more than play, and that will lose some people around the second arc. The PC launch is bad enough that crossplay is currently a liability rather than a feature, and Year 1 is thinner than the format warrants.
Buy it on PS5 if you have ever wanted a Marvel fighter that is its own thing rather than an echo of 2011, or if you are a lapsed fighting game player looking for a way back in. Buy it if you want the best-looking fighting game on the console, because that is what this is. Hold off on PC until the optimization patches land, and if you play on Linux or a Steam Deck, do not buy it at all yet, because it will not start. On a PS5, though, I have no meaningful hesitation. Nine years was a long wait. This was worth most of it.
